A lightweight approach to performance portability with targetDP

Alan Gray, Kevin Stratford
2016 The international journal of high performance computing applications  
Leading HPC systems achieve their status through use of highly parallel devices such as NVIDIA GPUs or Intel Xeon Phi many-core CPUs. The concept of performance portability across such architectures, as well as traditional CPUs, is vital for the application programmer. In this paper we describe targetDP, a lightweight abstraction layer which allows gridbased applications to target data parallel hardware in a platform agnostic manner. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our pragmatic approach by
more » ... presenting performance results for a complex fluid application (with which the model was codesigned), plus a separate lattice QCD particle physics code. For each application, a single source code base is seen to achieve portable performance, as assessed within the context of the Roofline model. TargetDP can be combined with MPI to allow use on systems containing multiple nodes: we demonstrate this through provision of scaling results on traditional and GPU-accelerated large scale supercomputers.
doi:10.1177/1094342016682071 fatcat:7qo4qg4ernhkbczsk2wpozdfae